Islam

It’s been a while, this seems to be how I always start these posts, It’s been a while and I’m sorry that it’s been so long. But as it’s Christmas, and like the crazy uncle who always smells of whiskey and stuffs fivers into your hands saying “don’t tell your mum”, I thought I’d show up again. What a year. What a goddam crazy year for me. At the end of this year I’m 35% less of the person I was at the beginning. I’ve lost 9 stone in total (how I did it is here), been signed to an agency, been a UK and International finalist in comedy awards I was nomiated for, gone viral a bunch and learned that Quorn is ground up mushroom. What a ride. I mean mushroom is pretty meaty on it’s own, why grind it up? Just eat mushrooms, fry them with butter or coconut oil, add garlic, delicious. I keep promising to update this blog more regularly but I’m never really sure what you want to read, there’s nearly 10,000 of you so it’s hard to please all of you. I’ve come to the conclusion that instead of being weird and picky about it I’m just going to post everything. Stories, pictures, videos, dates of stuff coming up, everything. Then you can decide. If at the end of next year there’s less of you than now maybe we’ll change it but really I’m sure there’s going to be more. I’ve been doing a joke advent calendar for the whole of December. Some of you will have seen these before in my other social media, some will have seen them when they went viral but I’m sticking all of them up here now so you’ve all definitely seen them straight from source. Enjoy

Actually that’s not entirely true. I wasn’t a bad comedian but in my own opinion I wasn’t good. I’d watch back sets of my own performances and cringe at myself. Thing is the audiences liked it, I was getting a lot of work and basically my career was on the rise but that only made it worse.

My problem was the material didn’t matter, I was doing jokes about stuff that wasn’t important to me. Sure here and there were a couple of bits about my family but overall it was a bunch of jokes about penises and poo. Again it’s fine for some comedians, it’s just that I’d wanted to be a different type of comic. I’d grown up with Billy Connolly talking about his childhood, Robin Williams discussing his addiction and mental health issues, Eddie Izzard opening the UK’s eyes to transgenderism and Victoria Wood championing feminism. Later on I would find Louis CK, Bill Hicks, George Carlin, Tim Minchin, Brendon Burns, Richard Pryor, John Oliver, David Cross, Maria Bamford, Mike Birbiglia and more but right there at the beginning of my love affair with comedy it was story tellers with issues.

I’d grown up with these people, I wanted to be like them, and right there in the middle of the career I’d worked so hard for I felt like I was failing. I started to hate my work, it wasn’t fun to write anymore and that meant the performance was all very stale. I felt like I was letting myself down but worse I was letting those iconoclasts of comedy down.

It couldn’t go on like that, I couldn’t hate doing the thing I’d loved my whole life. I’d worked so hard and it felt like the thing that defined me slipping away. I mean if I wasn’t a comedian what was I?

So I changed. I forced myself to write about subjects I felt like were important. You know what happened after that, you’ve followed me because of the change I made. Before that I was another comedian making jokes about the same subjects. It’s alright for some but for me personally it wasn’t enough and that showed in the work.

In no way am I saying that I’m even close to those heroes of mine that inspired me to do standup but I feel like I’m getting closer, that I’m on the right path. I went to see Louis CK last year and 3 of his jokes were similar to jokes I’d been developing for my show, that was incredibly encouraging. I mean I had to ditch 3 bits that I knew definitely worked but still it’s great to know you’re thinking in the same way as your idols.

This week I did a solo show at Leicester and it was full. People came who had seen me the year before or who followed me online. It was exceedingly flattering to be in a room full of people all agreeing that the comedian I was now was so much better than the comedian I was then. Those comedians I looked up when I was growing up changed my mind about a lot of things and I’m hoping that now I’m starting to make as much of a difference as they did.

Thanks to everyone that came on Tuesday, it was incredibly humbling. Next year I’ll be doing 3 dates because of how well it went. Until then here’s some very short snippets from the show.